It’s twenty years since James Shapiro published 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which fused literary criticism with political and social history in bravura fashion. Shapiro vigorously debunked the Romantic notion that Shakespeare was an artist who transcended his own era.

Once the province of the art historian, the country house has become the focus of all manner of scholarly investigations over the past forty or fifty years. Everything from the economics of estate management and the lives of domestic servants to the Jewish country house, the queer country house and the country house’s links to colonialism has come under scrutiny.

Britain isn’t working – for different reasons, voters across the political spectrum affirm this view. You don’t need to subscribe to the more dystopian accounts of the country’s state to recognise its validity.

As the title suggests, Williams focuses on the period after the Western-inspired regime change which led to the assassination of Muammar Gadaffi and threw Libya into years of turmoil and destruction.

‘The English cannot assimilate any nation,’ declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. ‘They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.’

In Geoffrey Household’s superlative thriller Rogue Male, from 1939, an English assassin-adventurer takes a potshot at Adolf Hitler and then flees for his life. An assassin’s intended victim is usually a “Hitler” of some sort. In July 2024, in Pennsylvania, an American youth aimed a rifle at Donald Trump from a rooftop and pulled the trigger.

Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy is an illuminating journey through the affective resonances of Christianity’s rites and rituals. Cosima Clara Gillhammer argues that liturgy is not the relic of a bygone age but a living tradition which has shaped the grammar of western culture, from Michelangelo’s Pietà to the Marvel Universe. It is a small treasure of a text.

It’s striking how, in describing a William Blake image entitled Infant Sorrow, a writer would note how its figures inhabit an indoor setting and state how this choice “must be Blake’s way of indicating that weeping and yelling confine and darken the mind.”

Understanding what motivates normal politicians to follow bad economic advice is difficult enough. Are they paying off some special interest, or do they really believe that two plus two equals three? With Donald Trump, the difficulty of interpreting the motivation for his policies sometimes goes to a whole different level.

Most people are aware, even if not knowledgeable, about the history of British imperialism in Africa and the Far East but few will have even heard about British exploits in Latin America.